Wednesday, 21 November 2007

just a quick note to anyone frequenting this blog: i'm currently moving into a new flat which means i won't be having internet access for a while. thus don't expect any new posts. feel free to leave requests. i'll definitely check them when i'm wired again ;)

thanks for caring about this blog & most of all enjoy the music. see y'all in about two weeks.

"For a change of pace the whopping 4-CD set MARS STUDIO might do you some good. It's the Denudes 1980-style, perhaps a little more professional and polished but still garage enough to sate, doing their familiar numbers in an actual studio. What makes this one different from other sessions I've heard is that Mizutani Takashi and crew, for some maybe not-so-strange reason, decided to utilize such instrumentation as electric organ and acoustic guitar into the usual hard rock mix adding for a rather unique, and perhaps even pleasing sound as in LOADED or maybe even (get this!) Hackamore Brick! (OK, that's hyperbole...whadja expect?) Those of you who only know this band from their previous recordings may be in for a surprise as I was, but the softer and less-metallic moments found herein did make for an experience that sorta reminds me of a Doug Yule-styled coup in the group, at least on a few numbers. Not that MARS STUDIO's a total trip into late-Velvet Underground straight-ahead dance rock since there are some great moments of BLUDGEON here, such as on disc three's opening track "Guitar Jam" which sounds something like a flub-a-dub take on "Blues' Theme" filtered through "Sister Ray." And if this track sounds familiar, it is! For years it was being passed off as a '69 number called "Smokin' Cigarette Blues" on that two-LP set with the wild photo of Mizutani adorning the front (as seen above, nicked off the Denudes' own website!) which seemed strange since the version I have on my bootleg burn of 67/69 was a totally different free-form freakout kinda thing! Oh well, it only makes me wonder all the more as to just how much of this info on Les Rallizes Denudes floating about we CAN believe!"

Friday, 16 November 2007

1. Réalisation II2. Nihility In Being3. Cat's Tail4. We Had A Love (But It Died)5. The Yell6. The Big House7. The Old Man's Ass8. Flight Of The Ocka Bird9. You Are My Sunshine

"The Roots of Madness were a group of teenage 'heads from the early '70s who attended Leigh High School in San Jose. Their LP of full-blown psychedelic freakery was locally released around 1970 and descended into hyperobscurity, until now. It's a reissue so totally needed because this music is such a stinky, boiling stew of fractured blues, primitive electronics, free jazz, and scatological spoken word, given an excessively potent kick from heaping doses of juvenile "hormonage" and some serious drug consumption. It opens with "Réalisation II" (they apparently skipped right over "Réalisation I"), which is a fierce, 11-minute crescendo of maniacally tinkling bells, gray blasts of shortwave radio, walkie-talkie gobbledygook, feedback, freely stabbing percussion, a chorus of throat-shredding howls, and pig-squealing horns. And that's just a warm-up for the real freaky shit, such as "The Old Man's Ass," wherein this incensed voice chants such anally obsessed verse as "The old man's wretched ass ... Grown nonfunctional with constipated eons of nonuse ... And the old man's crack? Watery, jelly skin dripping through fingers ... Turning the hills of youth into a canyon. A canyon eroded by venereal shankers and fiery and proud hemorrhoids." Amen for gratuitously disgusting weirdness." (Justin F. Farrar, via)

"'The Girl in the Chair' was named for a disabled girl in school who, confined to a wheelchair, wheeled around the high school parking lot, busting fellow students for necking and smoking cigarettes. Somehow, neither her advisors, family, nor fiends were able to fathom that this duty would make her one of the most ridiculed people in school. 'The Girl' became a metaphor for all the forces which combined to turn places of education into mini-prisons, where questioning, creativity, and freedom to be oneself were routinely repressed." (via)

Monday, 12 November 2007

Disk 1: Travelon Gamelon (Music For Bicycles)1. Promenade Version (Boston, MA, July 2, 1979)2. Concert Version (Pittsburgh, PA, June 6, 1981)3. Promenade Version (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 27, 1982)4. Concert Version (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 27, 1982)5. Concert Version (Wellington, New Zealand At Victoria University, July 31, 1986)

Disk 2: Selected Works1. For Two of Them2. Sections for Screen, Performers and Audience3. End of the Line: Some Recent Dealings with Death4. Accretion Disk, Event Horizon, Singularity5. 2½ Minutes for BASF Loop6. Soundspot7. Music for Plinky and Straw

"Aoi no Ue" is based on "Genji Monogatari" ("The Tale of Genji"), written by a Japanese noblewoman named Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century and believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever. On a sidenote, the story has been illustrated by most brilliant Yoshitaka Amano who provided the artwork for Mamoru Oshii's "Tenshi no Tamago" (which is recommendable to anyone interested in surrealistic and progressive animation).

Also, the third installment of the "Obscure Tape Music of Japan" series is available over at Different Waters.

1. 1382 Wyclif Gen. ii. 7 And spiride in to the face of hym an entre of breth of lijf.2. 1390 Gower Conf. II. 20 I can noght thanne unethes spelle that I wende altherbest have rad.3. 1440 Promp. Parv. 518/2 Wawyn, or waueryn, yn a myry totyr, oscillo.4. 1483 Caxton Golden Leg. 208 b/2 He put not away the wodenes of his flessh with a sherde or shelle.5. 1559 W. Cuningham Cosmogr. Glasse 125 Within which draw an other Circle, a finger bredth distant.6. (Gorgeous curves lovely fragments labyrinthed on occasions entwined charms, a few stories at any longer sworn to gathered from a guileless angel and the hilt edges of old hearts, if they do in the guilt of deep despondency.)7. 1671 Milton Samson 1122 Add thy Spear, a Weavers beam, and seven-times-folded shield.

Tuesday, 6 November 2007

Another Univive release spanning 4 CDs (alas, i couldn't yet find the fourth one which i believe is a bonus disk containing material from the Kanagawa show on November 7th 1980). The remaining three disks comprise recordings from the following dates: (1) July 13th 1973, (2) October 1st 1975, and (3) July 22nd 1977.